When your mind wanders over events and experiences you’ve had, do these tend to be good ones or memories you’d rather push away? How about when you’re faced with a new situation where it’s not clear whether this is something to relish or dread?

You may figure that whichever way you interpret your own past, present, and future is a function of a quality baked into your psyche. If you’re lucky, you were born with a sunny optimism, or you may feel you were cursed with a joyless view of the world.

It’s now understood in the field of adult emotional development that the tendency to see life in positive terms is more apparent in older people. Either it’s the happier ones who survive longer, or there is a true shift in emotional processing so that people actually start to put on a more chipper outlook.

If it’s true that later life is associated with that positive mindset, maybe there’s hope for those who don’t think they were born with it. If this effect is only due to the luck of the survivor, it’s still worth finding out where to locate those rose-colored glasses.

Where Does This Positivity Come From?

As reported in a new study by Macquarie University’s Diana Matovic and colleagues (2025), the positivity effect emerges from a kind of emotional processing bias that develops when people face limited future time. Ordinarily, this sense of time passing is one that inevitably develops the older you get. It’s also possible to induce a positivity effect whenever people face a foreshortened future and want to maximize what’s left of their time. The basic reason for this is that when there’s little time left, you’d rather spend it maximizing your feelings of happiness rather than fretting about the little things that bother you.

The primary theoretical position behind this reasoning is called socioemotional selectivity theory (SST); quite literally, you “select” positive experiences in your “socio” (world) to maximize your positive emotions. After several decades of research on this theory, much of it experimental, social psychologists who study aging have shown it applies to a wide swath of situations. Even showing people in the lab a computer face that is smiling or frowning can produce age differences. Older people’s eyes drift toward happy and away from sad; younger people either do the opposite or show no preference.

Matovic and her colleagues wondered if there are “boundary” conditions on SST. What if you primed people with stimuli that reflected outcomes older people would rather not think about, such as developing health problems? Would that temper the positivity effect? Or, what if you literally gave people no choice except to look at negative mood-inducing stimuli?

Testing the Limits of Positivity

Across two studies comparing older and younger Australian adults, Matovic et al. created experimental conditions where they presented participants with ambiguous scenarios varying in content involving health vs. social situations. In both studies, the two age groups of participants (18-25 vs. 60-85 years) provided their interpretations of the scenarios after watching a short film clip that primed their emotions to be happy (“The Jungle Book”), sad (“The Lion King”), or neutral (a documentary).

You ask your doctor about your condition, and your doctor has not responded immediately. Why?

While talking to your best friend about one of your concerns, you notice that they are looking away. Why?

The findings supported SST overall, showing that older adults imposed more positive interpretations on the ambiguous scenarios, even when health-related situations were involved. Moreover, although the negative mood induction worked for both age groups, this did not affect the tendency for older adults to look for positive outcomes in the scenarios, even those involving health. If anything, it was the younger adults who were more likely to derive negative interpretations from health-related situations.

However, one interesting tidbit from the second study deserves mention. Those older adults in the neutral mood induction condition were more likely to interpret ambiguous social situations as positive than those in the positive induction. As the authors concluded, “Thus, older adults’ expertise from time lived considering the potential salience of past incorrect social judgments may have taught them to reduce the positivity of social interpretations in a positive mood to avoid risky, overly optimistic or positively biased decision making” (p. 16).

In other words, better to be cautious when figuring out whether a situation is good or bad rather than let your mood steer you in the wrong direction.

Polishing up Your Own Rose-Colored Glasses

This impressive investigation expands positivity theory to situations that could be downright threatening to older adults; namely, possible negative health outcomes.

A few caveats are in order. The authors caution that the study was based on a relatively well-educated sample of people all living in Australia. Additionally, you might have picked up on that wide range of the older adult group compared to the young adults. Twenty-five years is a long span. However, to their credit, the authors controlled for possible effects of chronic health conditions, anxiety, and depression.

With all this in mind, the findings still have merit and potential use to anyone regardless of age. As you read those scenarios, what were your reasons “why”? Did you automatically assume bad things to be happening that caused them? How many other situations in your own life do you apply similar reasoning to?

Matovic and her colleagues believe that the study’s results could have implications for improving the way that health information is presented to people at risk. Emphasizing that positive outcomes could come even from questionable situations could reduce people’s fears (including those of young people) about exposing themselves to health information.

The other lesson to be learned is that maybe your elders know something you don’t. How did they reach that point from their “expertise from time lived” to know how to carve happiness out of ambiguity? And if you’re an “elder” yourself, you can pat yourself on the back if you, too, are able to hum a happy tune despite life’s challenges.

To sum up, knowing that the positivity effect is something that may come with age can be encouraging. If it doesn’t come naturally to you, try to find ways to start now, so you don’t have to wait.